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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the aesthetic experience, and taught its elements and its value, but I
have never seen a person in whom the gift was not native actually experi–
ence the "shock of recognition" which a poem (or any work of art) gives
its appreciator. And it is individuals to whom the aesthetic experience is
closed, or those who know what it is, but wish to load it with a misplaced
weight of "meaning" (and it seems incredible that such people as the last
named exist; it is one of the horrors of life that they do)-it is such people
who think that this experience can be "used."-Certainly the audience for
the disinterested and the gratuitous in writing was never very large, in
America. The layer of American "culture" has always been extremely thin.
And it has not deepened in itself, but has been subject to fashions hastily
imposed upon it. And the American "cultural" background is thick with
ideas of "success" and "morality." So a piece of writing which is worth
nothing, and means nothing (hut itself} is, to readers at large, silly and
somewhat immoral. "Serious writing" has· come to mean, to the public, the
pompous or thinly documentary. The truly serious piece of work, where a
situation is explored at all levels, disinterestedly, for its own sake, is
outlawed.
3. No.....:....The corruption of the literary supplements is nearly complete,
but who would expect it to be otherwise, when publishers admit that they
are selling packaged goods, for the most part: that their products, on the
whole, stand on the same level as cigarettes and whiskey, as sedatives and
pain·killers?- I have written criticism for liberal weeklies and can testify
that in the case of one of them, no pressure of any kind has ever been put
upon me. I have also been left perfectly free by a magazine which makes
no claim to be anything but amusing. . . . Serious criticism is, now in
America, seriously hampered by the extraordinarily silly, but really (on
the sentimental public at large), amazingly effective under-cover methods
of certain pressure groups. But if there is no one who has the good sense
to see the difference between warmed-over party tracts and actual analysis
-if the public swallows such stuff whole-perhaps that is what the public
deserves. Perhaps there is a biological bourgeoisie, thick headed and
without sensibilities, thrown up into every generation, as well as an eco·
' nomic one. I discovered, long ago, that there are human attributes the
gods themselves, as some one has said, cannot war against, and some of
them are stupidity, greed, vanity, and arrogance.
4. I have never been able to make a living by writing poetry and it has
never entered my mind that I could do so. I think the place in our present
American set-up for the honest and detached professional writer is both
small and cold. (But then, it was both small and cold for Flaubert, in 19th
century France.)
5. My writing reveals some "allegiances" (if this term means certain
marks made upon it by circumstance) . I was brought up in the Roman
Catholic Church, and was exposed to real liturgy, instead of the dreary
